The coordinated slaughter of Muslims in two New Zealand mosques last week was the latest atrocity sociopaths have committed in the name of the white race.  The idea that there is such a thing as a “white race” and that it is superior to all others defines a disgusting but deeply historically rooted movement that civil society must stamp out.  White supremacy is a comfortingly naive ideology that turns its adherents into soulless monsters, waging war on the racial and religious toleration central to peaceful, free, democracies.

In the US, white supremacy has long been associated with the local and provincial order of the Ku Klux Klan.  The Klan’s commitment to violence against blacks takes the form of a face-to-face fraternity whose members “man up” by getting together in numbers and donning disguises that mask the essential cowardice of their heinous acts.  The psychology of the cult and its rituals binds powerless and feckless individuals together, emboldening them to commit terrifying sins against their neighbors.

Lately, however, white supremacy is taking a different form, manifest in the persona of one of the gunmen who mowed down the Muslim worshippers in New Zealand.  He committed his crime in broad daylight, alone, even broadcasting it live on social media.  This was an individual zealot who methodically prepared for this day, justifying it with a manifesto he published on Facebook and linking his actions to a “tradition” of ideologically motivated hate crimes committed in recent years in Charleston, South Carolina, and in Norway, where a so-called “white knight” slew 77 people.

In an outstanding segment of the PBS Newshour, historian Katherine Belew urged viewers to recognize that these apparently disparate “lone wolf” attacks are part of a global “White Power” movement.  Though perpetrators are often socially and geographically isolated, they share the same creed and believe their crimes serve a common purpose, that of “defending” “white civilization” (typically defined as Christian) against people who are non-Christian or non-white.  Civil society, the ultimate victim of these kindred crimes, must cease to reward such sociopaths with publicity and fully discredit the febrile ideology that  fuels the assertion of “white power.”

Image: Charles Henry Dana, “Like the Moth, It Works in the Dark” (circa 1922)
from this source.

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